


Trash

by equestrianstatue



Category: Hard Core Logo (1996)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28264932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: They were nineteen when Joe broke Billy’s nose onstage.
Relationships: Joe Dick/Billy Tallent
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Trash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spuffyduds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/gifts).



BREAKNECK: What’s your songwriting process?

DICK: I wouldn’t call it a process. There’s no map, it’s not A to B to C. But I would say there are two places a song usually starts. One is when there’s a line or an idea that I can’t get out of my head, and it goes round and round until it drives me crazy. That’s where most of the songs come from. But the other way is when a song starts with Billy, and it’s a riff or a lick that he can’t stop playing. Then, either way, either of those beginnings, eventually we’ll take what we’ve got to the other one, and say, “Is this good, or is this bullshit?”

TALLENT: And we’ll say: “It’s bullshit.”

DICK: But then maybe Billy keeps thinking about the line that I said, or I’ll be humming the riff he’s been playing, and we’ll come back and say, “Hey, what about if you did this, or changed this?” It’s a very organic thing, it’s a— what’s the word? Two in one, two things together, you know—

TALLENT: Erotic.

DICK: Yeah. Very.

TALLENT: Parasitic.

DICK: Symbiotic.

TALLENT: The first song we ever wrote was just me playing two chords over and over. And you screaming at the top of your voice: “Fuck your mom, go to hell.”

DICK: I still think we should have put it on the first album.

TALLENT: [laughs]

DICK: But that’s the thing— sure, that’s not much of a song, but it’s still a creative process, when two people make something together. And creating with somebody else changes you, makes you think differently, because you’re partly thinking as them. You become each other for a little while. Obviously if you have a shared history, if you already know how to think like each other, it helps.

*

They were nineteen when Joe broke Billy’s nose onstage.

“You didn’t break it,” Billy says, when Joe is trying to tell the story. He always interrupts around the same part, determined to cut Joe off at the knees. Only it doesn’t matter, the specifics of bone and cartilage, it’s what the story means that matters, which Billy has never fucking understood. “Didn’t break it— you ever see a guy with a broken nose? It’s all— ” He slices his hand through the air over his nose, like an imaginary machete. “Fucked up like that, zig-zag, bent. I never got that, ‘cause it never broke.”

“I fuckin’ broke your fuckin’ nose, smashed it in— should’ve seen the blood.”

“Should’ve seen the blood,” Billy agrees. He mimes the arc of it, the outward spray. “All over the stage, my God. Fucking Red Sea.”

“Kids went wild.”

“The kids went _wild_.”

“Trying to touch it, like you were some kind of fuckin’— Jesus, you know?”

“Jesus never had— nobody was ever trying to touch Jesus’s blood.”

“Jesus ever broke his nose on stage, they’d’ve been trying to touch his blood.”

“Sure.” Then Billy always says: “It was an accident,” which kind of ruins the story all over again. “I’m behind you, coming up to your mic— though you must _know_ I’m coming up for the chorus— ”

“I didn’t know shit. Could hardly hear myself, no fuckin’ monitors on that stage, you could’ve been anywhere.”

“Never seen you turn round that fast before. Like someone lit a fire under your ass.”

“So I turn round, whip round, and Billy’s come up behind me right here, and the head of _my_ guitar comes up here— ” Joe claps his hands together, hard, sickening. “Never seen anything like it, holy shit. The guitar’s covered in blood, _he’s_ covered in blood, he’s spitting it in my face.” To Billy: “I thought you were gonna walk off stage.”

“I don’t know if I could’ve. I couldn’t fucking _see_. I remember the way it hurt was— it was really loud. It was like the pain was louder than the music, louder than the whole club, and I remember trying to keep playing, thinking, _fuck, I can’t hear, but I gotta keep going_.”

“I thought you were gonna walk right off stage. But then you looked at me and you didn’t look angry, you looked— like— I’d never seen you look like that, man, I don’t know. It was like you’d _ascended_.”

Billy thinks it’s funny, dumb, when Joe says things like that— or else he thinks he’s showing off. He curls his mouth into that little smile that manages to be indulgent and mocking all at once. Usually catches the eye of whoever Joe’s trying to tell the story to, maybe a quirk of the eyebrow.

Billy’s always trying to get other people to gang up on Joe with him, in tiny, pointless ways. Like he’s trying to prove to Joe that he can make friends with other people, and that he can do it better than Joe can. Which he wouldn’t have to try and prove if he wasn’t worried that it wasn’t true. And _that’s_ dumb, because people obviously like Billy. They like him more than they like Joe, and it’s because Billy can do this calm, charming, ingratiating little turn, and it makes chicks laugh and interviewers nod and smile and motel owners change their minds about throwing them out— whatever it is he needs, Billy can get it. Which pisses Joe off, because he can’t shake the feeling that it’s all fake, it’s all for show. That Billy’s just pretending to be what he thinks an adult is supposed to be like.

Then Billy says to whoever it is: “See, the funny thing was, up to then, we were bombing. _Dying_. The kids hated us. I mean we only really had two or three songs, and we kept playing ‘em over and over.” He glances at Joe. “If you hadn’t’ve done it, I think maybe someone in the crowd was about to get up and smash my face in anyhow. And then suddenly— ” Billy’s grin is wide. “Soak the stage in blood and they go fucking feral. I couldn’t’ve walked out on that. We played that same club every month for a year, maybe two years after that— sold out every single time. It was like we’d become this legend.”

“Yeah,” says Joe. “That’s it.”

“Maybe I should’ve hit you back,” says Billy. “Maybe then we wouldn’t’ve had to wait another three years for a record deal.”

*

DICK: That’s what I mean by hardcore, you know? It’s about the refusal to give in, the refusal to change your shit or change yourself. It’s the opposite of fashion, it’s the opposite of being a fucking, you know, a butterfly.

TALLENT: It’s about not compromising.

DICK: Exactly. You compromise— that’s death. Death to integrity, death to musicality, death to your fucking soul, man.

TALLENT: I think that’s the challenge, to evolve without compromising.

DICK: And that’s the kicker, huh? The whole scene, the press— your good selves most certainly included— is this focus on what’s new, what’s never been seen before. Newsflash, motherfuckers: if you’re worshipping the new in a totally un-fucking-critical way, that’s the worst kind of shallow. That’s a refusal to engage with the heart of what people are doing that I actually find personally fucking insulting.

*

The big secret is that the reality of band life— road cases and basements, beer and blow, seven fucking albums, sex and motels— all of it, more and bigger than they ever could’ve imagined back in ’77— that maybe it can never live up to the pure perfect high of just imagining it. Anticipating it, knowing it was coming, knowing how amazing it was going to be when it did. Making noise in Joe’s basement just to make noise, for the joy of creating sound, when the only people they cared about impressing were each other.

The music used to be a conversation between them. The worst gigs, now, it’s like a wall of loud, crashing silence; they’re playing and singing at the same time, but not together. Often the music is an argument, but at least that way it’s something real and alive between them. Joe does it on purpose sometimes— changes words, shifts song entirely with no warning, because he knows it’ll piss Billy off. But at least when Billy’s pissed at him he’s _there_ , he’s on stage, paying attention, maybe even fighting back. He’s not just going through the motions, head somewhere else, somewhere bigger, better.

It’s easy to be everything to someone else when you’re fourteen, fifteen, and your world is very small. A few square miles of gray suburb. School and the strip mall and your bedroom. One or two clubs you can talk your way into, one or two parks with gates low enough to climb at night. In a world as small as that, you can revolve around one another like twin stars. Billy was the only thing in the shitstorm of adolescence burning bright enough to see.

Billy doesn’t do nostalgia: he does forwards, upwards. Rather top himself than go back there, he once said, like it was a joke, but also like it was obvious.

Joe wonders when Billy started thinking it was dangerous, how well they knew each other. That it was a weapon they were both holding. If you know everything about someone, you know exactly how to take them out. Joe always thought the better you knew someone, the tighter together you held, the safer you are. The stronger your fortress. But Billy thinks they’re both sitting on a pile of grenades they could let loose at each other at any moment, and that the pile gets bigger every day.

*

TALLENT: Of course when you’re fifteen you want other people to like you. But of course when you’re fifteen you pretend that you don’t. You say: “I’m doing this totally fucked up thing that nobody else will like, and I’m doing it that way on purpose, just to piss everyone off.” But secretly you want them to like it. And you tell yourself that you want them to hate it, because that makes you cool or interesting, making people hate you. But actually you just can’t bear the thought of trying to be liked, and failing. I think everybody feels that way when they’re young.

DICK: I still don’t care if people hate us.

TALLENT: See, when he says that, sometimes I almost believe him. And obviously we’re lucky that people do like us, that we have the whole scene here supporting us, so that we can keep doing what we do, we can keep making the music.

DICK: Billy’s changed his tune on this. He used to say: if you think someone’s being good to you, either they’re trying to fuck you or they’re trying to fuck you over.

TALLENT: Actually, I think it was Joe who used to say that.

DICK: I still do.

*

They were sixteen the one and only time Joe jerked Billy off.

It was late, and there was a moth buffeting the shade on the light in Joe’s bedroom, where both of them had been subsisting for what felt like days. Summer break. The room smelled like B.O. and weed and mold, and Billy had his eyes shut, squeezed tight shut like he was trying to pretend he’d gone somewhere else. Like if he couldn’t see Joe, maybe Joe didn’t exist, or maybe _Billy_ didn’t exist, or neither of them did.

Billy’s head was wrenched sideways, so that if his eyes were open he would’ve been staring at the Dolls poster on the wall, eyeballing David Johansen, which even at the time Joe thought was kind of funny. It was maybe a bet, maybe a dare, Billy would say later. He remembers it as a game of chicken, although Joe doesn’t.

Joe remembers how hot Billy’s dick felt in his hand, because he couldn’t really see it— they were sat on the floor leaning against Joe’s bed, and Billy’s jacket was in the way. He remembers _Raw Power_ was playing, and he remembers the way Billy grit his teeth like it was hurting him. He remembers wanting Billy to turn around and look at him, and not knowing how to make him do it.

He ended up kind of butting his head against the side of Billy’s face, harder than he’d meant to. It didn’t make Billy turn round, but he bit his lip and then said, “Jesus, Joe,” just before he came.

Joe wiped his hand on Billy’s t-shirt and then on his face. Billy did look round then, and said, “You’re gross, fuck you,” and tried to shove him off. When Joe wouldn’t stop, they grappled for a moment until Billy got him knocked to the ground— for all he was smaller, skinnier, Billy was a little wildcat if you wound him up right. He knelt on Joe’s wrist hard, and said again, “You’re fucking gross, disgusting,” and made like he was going to spit in Joe’s face— but by then they’d both started laughing.

Then the record ended and Billy got up to turn it over, and when he turned round he’d zipped up his pants, and he never did Joe in return, not that either of them had said he would.

*

DICK: It’s all about reciprocation. When you’re on stage, the band and the audience, it’s a two-way street. A gig is them as much as it is us. I don’t like working in the studio. You have to do it, because you have to get the record cut to book the tour— but really I just want to do the tour.

TALLENT: I like the studio time more than Joe, I think. I like having the chance to get a song as good as it can be. There’s the time for craft, for experimentation, that you don’t get anywhere else. But yeah, it’s different to being on stage.

DICK: Punk dies in the studio.

TALLENT: And yet we keep coming back to life.

*

They were twenty-five when Billy broke Joe’s nose.

Not on stage; fifteen minutes off. Regina, a bad gig— although the crowd had been good, worked up, raucous. But it hadn’t fixed whatever it was that was fucking them up lately, which Joe had thought was maybe just the shitty energy of a few bad turnouts. But even with the room heaving, something wasn’t right. Cues missed, nothing gelling right. Half a beat out of sync.

They were in the basement’s excuse for a green room, Pipe and John already having high-tailed it to the bar, Billy giving Joe the royal fucking silent treatment. It drove Joe nuts when Billy got like this: clearly pissed at something, but pretending like he’s above it. Like it’s not even worth the argument, like he’s the kind of person who doesn’t want to fight.

“You want one?” Joe held out a beer, and Billy glanced at it and shook his head, so Joe set it down on the tabletop. Took a swig of his own. “Something on your mind? You want to share with the class?”

Billy shook his head again. “Not a thought in my head.”

“Now I know that ain’t true. Never in your life have you had your head empty.”

“Jesus, Joe, will you give it a rest?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Just making conversation. Didn’t realize you booked this room for yourself. I’ll head on out, and you just ring the bell when you need anything, huh?”

“Don’t be a prick.” Billy was slumped back on one of the two greasy couches, staring at the ceiling, and he rubbed his fingers into his eyes.

“Actually, I am not the one here displaying prick-like behavior, for once. You come off stage, you don’t say a goddamn word to anyone— what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, Joe. You do know not everything in my fucking world is about you, right?”

“So it’s about what?”

Billy made a short little sound of frustration, but at least he looked up and looked Joe in the eye. “Okay,” he said. “You wanna do this your whole life?” The little upwards flick of his head— the way it took in the club above them, the kids still dancing upstairs, Pipe and John, the beer-slicked floor and the shitty sound system— all of it, everything that kept them going, was coupled with total disdain in Billy’s expression.

Joe folded his arms. “I don’t know, man. What’s that supposed to mean? Sure, when I’m seventy, eighty, no, I do not want to be fucking doing this.”

“Seventy?” said Billy, with a face like he’d eaten shit. “Try twenty-seven.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, Mr Tallent, what do _you_ want to be doing at twenty-seven?”

Billy shrugged. “Something better.”

“Oh, sure, better than this, you mean— movie star. Porn star. Fucking— astronaut.”

“Or maybe just venues where we’re not loading in our own shit every night. You think? It’s been how many years working our asses off, and for what? Plate of corn chips and a case of Molson? Don’t tell me that’s what _you_ always wanted.“

“No, fuckhead, I want to play our music to people who want to hear it, get paid, get laid, and I don’t give a fuck about much else.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“My God, listen to yourself. You’d have killed for this ten years ago— for real, I mean. Wouldn’t have put it past you, wouldn’t have put anything past you. This is it, man. Those kids up there, we’re their gods, and if you want more than that, let me tell you something, you’re in the wrong fucking band.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Billy.

When Joe didn’t say anything more, Billy scratched his hand through his hair, pushed himself up and out of the couch, grabbed the beer Joe had left on the table, and went over to the door.

_You do it on purpose_ , Billy said to Joe, sometimes. _You know how to push all of my fucking buttons, and you just keep mashing them._

“Well, good luck,” said Joe to Billy’s back, “’cause you know no other band’s gonna have you.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

“I would. I’d be mighty fucking surprised.”

Billy turned to face him. “Just because you’ve been a fuck-up since birth, Joe, doesn’t mean I’m the same. You do know that, don’t you?”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“Well, you can try, Mr I’m Too Good For This Shit, go on and give it a good go, and best of fucking luck. But just remember one thing, okay? Which is that you ain’t too good for it, and you never will be, because you’re a hack. And however many times you try to climb that pole, someone’s gonna see you for what you’re worth and grease you up and push you right back down again.”

Billy’s lip curled. He came up to Joe close enough that Joe could feel his breath, see the glint of his teeth. And when Joe reached out to knock Billy on the side of the head, Billy moved faster. His lunged forward, quick and vicious, and there was a crunch as his forehead hit Joe hard in the face.

The pain was louder than everything else, for a couple of seconds. It buzzed in Joe’s ears and clogged up his brain, louder than the band upstairs and the kids jumping on the floor above them, louder than Billy’s sharp, angry breathing. For a moment Joe couldn’t think through it, but when he could, he didn’t hate it. At least it was definitely fucking real.

Joe looked up at Billy, who was staring at him, eyes clear and furious. “See?” Joe said, breathing through his mouth, the blood thick in his head, and grinned. “Who else is gonna have you? Who else is gonna let you do that and still kiss you in the morning?”

“Fuck you,” said Billy, shoving him sideways, though not nearly as hard, the fight going out of him like the tide. “Fuck you, man.” Then he shouldered his way out of the basement door, letting it swing shut behind him.

Joe sat down on the couch and grabbed the beer Billy had left unopened. It was just about still cold, so he pressed it up against his nose, with one sleeve bunched up to get most of the blood. It was like waves, the pain, throbbing in his nose and face, but if he closed his eyes it wasn’t so bad. So he downed the rest of his open beer, and didn’t open his eyes again until he heard the blast of noise as the door swung open again, a few minutes later.

“Here,” said Billy. His mouth was pinched, eyes flat, but he was carrying a bucket of ice from the bar.

Billy picked up a towel from the floor and scooped up a handful of ice inside it. Joe held out a hand to take it from him, but Billy ignored him, came over to the couch, and held the towel against Joe’s face, weirdly carefully.

*

DICK: The thing you have to understand is that a band isn’t a band because of the albums or the instruments or the songs. A band is a band because it’s an idea, a concept, that exists in someone’s mind. And as long as the idea exists, the band exists.

TALLENT: I would say the songs are also part of it.

DICK: The songs are also part of it. But if you took the music away— if you actually erased it, if you destroyed every recording we’d ever made— and I still believed we were a band, we’d still be a band.

OXENBERGER: I think at that point I would probably leave the band.

DICK: Wouldn’t make a difference. It’s something we made, me and Billy— when we were kids, we needed it to be real, we needed it so much that it _became_ real. Before we’d written a single song, we decided we were a band, and we meant it, and so we were.


End file.
